The blow was hard and low on one side of his back, hard enough to make him grunt and pitch forward on to his knees. Furious, bewildered, he staggered upright and turned to see Malise standing there, his face bloody and misshapen.
‘Ye gobshite,’ he snarled and started toward the man, only to find himself falling. He thought he had tripped and tried to spring up, aware that the blow on his back had started to burn.
‘Not so cantie now, houndsman,’ Malise hissed, wincing at the pain it caused him, and now Tod saw the dull winking steel in his hand, knew he was knifed and that it was a bad wound. He couldn’t seem to get up, though he kept trying, watching Malise’s booted feet move to the slumped, groaning figure of the knight.
Malise found the pulse of the moaning man’s neck with his fingers. The knight stirred, half-opened his eyes, wet and miserable in their pits of bruising.
‘Who is there?’ he asked in French and Malise cut the throat and the life from him in a swift, easy gesture of point and ripping edge.
He turned back to Tod’s Wattie, gasping and clawing up the mulch with one hand, the other trying to reach round to the pain in his back. Malise’s grin was feral and bright.
Slick as lamp oil, viscous with fluids, thick with dead like studs on a leather jack, the causeway to the brig was Hell brought to the surface of the earth and Isabel staggered along it, half-blind with fear and tears, falling as often as she walked and with no clear idea of where she was, or where she was going. Away. Just away from the unleashed monster that was Malise.
Figures moved in the twilight of the dying day, flitting like crouching demons, spitting out incoherent curses whenever they encountered another of their kind as they crow-fought over the dead.
The smell was rank and there was a noise, a low hum like the wind through a badly fitting door, as those still alive moaned out the last of their lives, calling on God, their mothers, anyone. They had lain here all through the day, dying hard and slow and untended save for the birds and the pillagers.
Isabel stumbled, fell, got up and staggered on, the silent terror behind her pushing her forward like a hand in her back. He had never hit her before. Never. The leash on him was off and Isabel knew Malise only too well, knew what he was capable of.
She weaved like the shadow of a drunk, found herself staring, slack-mouthed, at a knot of half-crouched figures, growling beast-shapes, half-silhouettes against the last greying light of the day, half gilded by the yellow light of a guttering horn lantern. One turned and she saw the knife, blood-sticky in a clotted hand. His other fist held a long, raw, wet strip of flesh and his eyes a crawling madness; the others never looked up, simply went on cutting and growling, as if butchering a fresh-killed sheep.
‘Get away from here, wummin,’ the man said and watched her lurch away before bending to his work again. It was only later, when the stories began to circle like a black wind, that Isabel realised that they had been flaying the English Treasurer, Cressingham.
Not then, though. She realised nothing but shapes and terror. A shadow fell on her as she collapsed, finally, to her knees and she whimpered; Malise had caught her. She looked up, squinting into the twilight and, with that part of her brain not screaming, she realised there was a splinter in her knee and that she was halfway across the brig.
‘You hag,’ said a voice out of the great black shape, a snorting Beelzebub whose cloven hooves stamped on the splintered planks. ‘There is no plunder on this side of the bridge, only death.’
Behind him, she saw the flames of hell leap up. Not Malise at all, but the Devil…
‘Mercy,’ she sobbed. ‘Have mercy on a poor sinner.’
She said it in French and the black shape paused, then leaned down. A strong arm grasped her own, hauling her upright. A face, sharp, black-bearded and weighing, thrust itself into her blurred vision, studied her for a long, curious moment, then turned his horse, so that she was hauled after him in a grip of iron.
‘Move if you want to live,’ the demon answered and she careered after him, shackled to his hand while the flames gibbered and danced, only vaguely wondering, in that small peach pit of sense left to her, why the Devil spoke French.
Chapter Eight
Balantrodoch, Templar Commanderie
Feast of St Andrew Protoclet, November 1297
Death came soft and gentle, yet harsh as haar, on the snow’s back. The news of it filtered down like the sifting flakes and crushed everyone with the chill of it.
The Hardy was dead in the Tower. The Auld Templar’s son was dead in the Tower. It was clear that the English Justinian, even though he was now in Flanders, had a long and petulant reach.
Worse still, the Auld Sire of Herdmanston was dead in Hexham Priory. Of his wounds, the messenger from Roslin said, but Hal knew better – his father, he was sure, had died of having been taken for ransom, at the realisation that he had fought bravely but with little skill and no strength, for age had robbed him of both.
He died from the knowledge that he had ruined Herdmanston, too, for the ransom would beggar the place and that, more than anything, Hal knew, had broken the life from the Auld Sire, like marrow from a snapped bone. The last thing Sir John could do to rescue the situation and all those who depended on him was to die.
And all because he had jumped off the fence, straight into the mire of a war where no-one was sure of his own neighbour. At the behest of the Auld Templar, too, which was worse still, for Hal was twice robbed of folk he held in high regard.
Now Herdmanston was threatened, because Hal had stayed and fought with his father, become a rebel for the Kingdom. The only saving grace in it was that the high wind of victory had stirred all the others off the fence. Bruce and Buchan, Badenoch and all the others – even the Scots lords who had argued the bit with Wallace and Moray the night before the battle – were all now committed to the Kingdom.
At least Wallace and Bruce and myself are all facing the same direction and foe, Hal thought.
The Dog Boy saw the misery etch itself into the face of Sir Hal, so that even the joy of the yapping, squirming terriers of Herdmanston’s kennels was driven from him by the sight.
‘Christ’s Bones,’ he heard Sim growl when he thought no-one could hear. ‘God and all his angels are asleep in this kingdom.’
The kingdom itself seemed asleep, as if so stunned by the victory at Stirling Brig that no-one could quite believe it. Yet the nobiles of the realm shifted and planned while the world draped itself in a mourn of frost.
Hal rode out from Herdmanston in a black trail to recover the body of his father. It had been brought by the Auld Templar to the Templar Commanderie at Balantrodoch in a lead-lined kist from Hexham and under a Templar writ which no sane man, Scot or English, would challenge.
The dour cavalcade from Herdmanston held Hal, Sim, Bangtail Hob, Ill Made Jock, Will Elliott and Lang Tam Loudon, all the men bar two from the square fortalice. The Dog Boy drove the jouncing, two-wheeled cart which would take the kist back to Herdmanston, tagging along like a terrier at Hal’s heels.
Sim knew that, for all Hal affected indifference, he was constantly aware of the boy and it was made clear when Sim saw him manage a wan smile at the sight of the Dog Boy’s face when they rode up to the Commanderie at Balantrodoch.
It was the first time the Dog Boy had been to the Templar headquarters in Scotland and it dropped the mouth open on him. Even the spital was a wonder. The roof was shaped like the hull of a ship turned upside down, to symbolise charity sailing about the world as a boat does on the sea. From the flagstoned floor to the apex of the roof was as tall as six men standing on each other’s shoulders and coloured glass windows spilled stained light everywhere. Even Hal was impressed, for it was the first time he had been inside the spital with enough light to see it clearly.
It was as wide as three men laid end to end, with king posts carved with gargoyles and the beams brightly painted and marked at regular intervals with the Beau Seant, the white banner with its black-barred top that marked the presence of the Order. Over each doorway was etched Non nobis, Domine, non nobis sed nomini tuo da gloriam, the beginning of the first verse of Psalm 115, ‘Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory.’
